Halo 3 Beta Delay for Crackdown Owners

There are a lot of grumpy Xbox 360 owners out there.

A downloadable, beta version of Microsoft's next entry in the Halo game franchise was supposed to be available yesterday to people who had purchased the game Crackdown earlier this year. So hotly anticipated is Halo 3 that more than a few gamers spent $60 on Crackdown just so they could get an early taste of the finished version of the blockbuster game, which is due out in September.

But Xbox 360 users logged on Wednesday morning with their copies of Crackdown hoping to see the new game and got... nothing. Micrsoft hasn't offered an explanation just yet, though the company has acknowledged the problem. "The Xbox team is well aware of this issue and working diligently to resolve it," reads a posting at Xbox.com.

Microsoft is taking a beating on the subject at its online Xbox 360 forums forums, where fans are complaining that they skipped school or work to play the beta, and haven't been able to download it.

"My day has just gone down the tubes waiting for this," wrote one disappointed fan, in one of the only publishable complaints at the site.

Update: That Halo 3 beta is working fine today. As of 8:30 am, when I downloaded and played a few rounds, there were over 30,000 people playing. Looks good to me, though I'm not sure the game beats Gears of War, imho.